About 70% of breast cancers are sensitive to estrogen—that is, estrogen contributes to their growth. Recently, researchers have found that paroxetine—the active ingredient in Paxil and Pexeva, some of the most widely prescribed SSRI antidepressants—has an estrogenic effect that likely promotes the development and growth of breast tumors in women.

The same study also identified bisphenol A, or BPA, which we have also warned about, as having estrogenic effects. BPA is found in some plastics, and in particular in the liner of tin cans and on many sales receipts.

In thinking about the breast cancer risk from SSRIs, keep in mind that clinical depression is twice as common in women as it is in men. In fact, one in four women in their 40s and 50s (one in ten Americans overall) now take an antidepressant medication.

As you may recall, last year the FDA approved paroxetine (marketed under the name Brisdelle) as a treatment for hot flashes and menopausal symptoms—despite the fact that the FDA’s own Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee voted 10 to 4 against approval, because the severe side effects associated with SSRIs outweigh the minor benefits. In addition, SSRIs can be highly addictive. Many people struggle to get off them.

The agency touted its decision to approve Brisdelle as an opportunity to provide women with a non-hormonal alternative to synthetic hormone replacement therapy (a common way to treat hot flashes). Why? Because synthetic—but not bioidentical hormone—therapy has been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer as well as heart disease.

Let’s walk through this. The two most important risk factors to developing breast cancer are being female and growing older: the older you get, the more likely you are to get breast cancer. So the FDA has approved a drug that may cause breast cancer for the group most at risk for breast cancer—in the hope of reducing breast cancer.

Is there a link between increased antidepressant use and increased rates of breast cancer? There’s no way to tell without a reputable, long-term study, but it’s not far-fetched to think that these two trends are linked.

You’ll note that the FDA conveniently ignored the safer alternative treatment option for post-menopausal symptoms: natural, bioidentical estriol. In addition, as Dr. Joseph Mercola points out, there are well over 800 references in the medical literature showing vitamin D’s effectiveness against cancer. Most recently, a meta-analysis of five studies published in the March 2014 issue of Anticancer Research found that patients diagnosed with breast cancer who had high vitamin D levels were twice as likely to survive compared to women with low levels. Moreover, high levels of vitamin D in conventional medicine is not really high by integrative medicine standards. Conventional medicine considers ng/ml blood levels of 30-100 to be safe. To prevent cancer and other health hazards, there is considerable evidence that levels need to be above 60 while still below 100.

For more about breast cancer and its diagnosis, see our other article in this issue.

Action Alert! Tell the FDA to reverse its approval of paroxetine for hot flashes. There is no reason for this dangerous drug’s approval, especially considering that it does the opposite of what it was intended to do when it was initially approved—reduce the risk of breast cancer. Send your message to the FDA today!

The post Popular Antidepressant May Promote Breast Cancer first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Are regular mammograms doing more harm than good? Let’s take a look at the science.

For the past two decades, controversy has swirled around the question of the benefits of mammography. Unfortunately, breast cancer is a huge and thriving industry, and its powerhouses have lined up squarely in support of mammography:
 

• Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which took in $342,373,526 in 2012 with major industry support and gave its CEO a 64% raise for a total pay package of $684,000, claims, “The Life-Saving Benefits of Mammography Are Clear!” (You may recall our 2011 article about Komen and their penchant for “pinkwashing.”)
• The American College of Radiology (ACR)—the organization that offers accreditation in breast MRI and mammography and rakes in tens of millions in fees from legally mandated mammography accreditations, says, “Mammography Saves Lives!”
• The American Cancer Society and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both recommend yearly mammograms, starting as young as age 40.

 
But what does the science say? This past February, a twenty-five-year-long Canadian trial found no difference in death rates from breast cancer among women who had regular mammograms and those who did not.
 
The American College of Radiology immediately trashed the study, calling it “incredibly flawed and misleading.” The ACR’s self-interested reaction dismayed many, particularly Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the highly respected Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He published a scathing opinion piece via CNN blasting the ACR, and fuming that “it’s time to get the science back in screening mammography and to recognize that mammographers may not be the ideal source for balanced information.” Well said, Dr. Welch!
 
But mammograms aren’t merely useless—they could very well be harmful. First, they may increase your risk of cancer by subjecting you to unnecessary radiation and by abusing breast tissue. Second, they’re inaccurate to the point of being downright dangerous. According to the National Institutes of Health, 90% of abnormal mammograms are false positives; even a staunch proponent like Komen acknowledges that the likelihood of getting a false positive over the course of ten screenings is 50 to 60%. Additionally, mammography misses 17% of cancers—that means for every ten breast cancers, two are completely undiagnosed.
 
A false positive causes more than anxiety—it can cause pain, financial distress, and exposure to risky, unnecessary medical procedures. Women who receive an abnormal mammogram must go through additional mammographic screenings, ultrasounds, magnetic resonance imaging, and even painful tissue samplings via fine-needle aspiration, core biopsy, or excisional biopsy. If there is cancer, biopsy can spread it.
 
Perhaps the saddest mammogram side effect is over-diagnosis and over-treatment—the treatment of breast “cancers” that most likely would never have resulted in illness or death. Many breast cancers resolve themselves. And treatment itself can endanger your health. Chemo attacks your body and immune system. Radiation pointed at the breast can damage the heart, potentially leading to death years later from heart failure. By then, of course, nobody will associate the heart disease with the radiation that caused it.
 
So, why promote mammograms if they’re ineffective and expensive? Well, if every woman who is recommended to get a breast exam did so, it puts $8 billion dollars a year into the pockets of the radiology industry.
 
Conventional medicine is not a unified bloc on this issue. More and more physicians, and even organizations that are typically opposed to integrative medicine such as the United States Preventative Services Task Force are recommending less frequent mammograms.
 
But if not mammograms, then what? Some kind of screening is necessary. After all, breast cancer is on the rise—in 2012, 1.7 million women were newly diagnosed with breast cancer, up 20% from 2008. And one in eight American women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. Although these figures are skewed by over-diagnosis, they still describe a very real threat.
 
Many integrative doctors recommend thermographic breast screening (thermography) as a safer, more effective alternative to mammograms. Thermography uses no uncomfortable mechanical pressure or ionizing radiation. Instead, it takes a picture of the heat produced by the body, which practitioners study for unusual changes or heat clusters. It can detect cancer up to ten years before a mammogram would, and can even detect cancer before tumors have formed.
 
The Mammogram Myth may be beginning to crumble, but don’t wait for the dust to settle—talk to your integrative physician about safer ways to prevent, detect, and treat breast cancer.
And for more about breast cancer and a popular FDA-approved drug that may be promoting it, see our other article in this issue.

The post The Breast Cancer Industry Is Deceiving Women first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• Publication bias. About half of all drug trials aren’t made publicly available, and positive findings are twice as likely to be published as negative findings for the same drug. So if a drug is harmful or doesn’t work, you’ll probably never hear about it. Conversely, if results are negative or can be made negative for supplements, which are thought to compete with drugs, you will certainly hear about it.
• “Seeding” trials. Should a study designed by the marketing department really be cited as scientific evidence? Big Pharma has been known to disguise marketing schemes as legitimate drugs trials (the most well-known example of this is Vioxx’s ADVANTAGE trial). The funding of negative supplement studies is often obscured, but we can guess where the money is coming from.
• Ghostwritten studies. Many “independent” studies are designed, conducted, and analyzed by drug companies—and then published under a physician’s name. In the case of supplements, researchers biased against supplements can readily be found, although the same names appear over and over again.
• “Perfect” patients. Study results can also be manipulated by choosing patients who you know in advance will demonstrate the outcome desired—for example, by giving patients with no nutrient deficiencies a multivitamin, and then concluding that supplements don’t make them healthier.
• Deceptively low doses. What’s an easy way to “prove” a dietary supplement has no impact on human health? Give it in such low doses that the result you want is guaranteed.
• Questionable methodologies. Do you remember what you ate for dinner, every night, for the past ten years? Probably not. Yet, many studies rely on “recall”—simply asking patients about as much as five years’ worth of health habits or to self-report whether or not they complied with experiment protocols. There studies are notoriously unreliable.
• Cherry-picking conclusions. A single study can lead to multiple—even conflicting—conclusions. Often, the media picks the most shocking conclusion, and ignores the rest. For example, when Mayor Bloomberg mandated flu shots for children under 5, he touted the vaccine’s 59% effectiveness rate. This is accurate—in a perfect, lab-controlled environment. The exact same document showed that in real-world settings, this rate tumbles to 24 to 36%.
• Skewed meta-analyses. Meta-analyses statistically combine the data of relevant individual studies. When done correctly, they can help researchers draw comprehensive conclusions from a large, diverse body of data. However, the integrity of a meta-analysis can easily be compromised: researchers may distort results by ignoring studies that don’t agree with their hypotheses, all while hiding behind the authoritative façade of meta-analysis.
• Tiny sample sizes. Many studies with just a few participants misleadingly claim “definitive” conclusions. But the smaller the participant pool, the less reliable the results (this is why proper meta-analyses can be so useful). Of course, many supplement studies are tiny because natural substances are not supposed to be patentable, which means that nobody will pay for a large study. This is why valid conclusions about supplements often employ the verb “may,” as in this supplement “may” improve heart health. Lab and animal studies may also provide further support for hypotheses drawn from small studies, but the FDA generally disregards them.
• Overly brief study periods. Researchers with an agenda can toy with a study’s length or timeframe. This is a great way to trim unwanted data, or avoid reporting undesirable health effects—for example, the hundreds of studies claiming GMOs are safe focus only on very short-term exposure; the effects of long-term exposure remains unstudied. Animal studies suggest that GMOs could have epigenetic effects that may even take generations to appear.
• Parroting press releases. In the age of instantaneous news, media outlets are eager to be the first to “get the scoop” on the latest, hottest study. In doing so, they usually simply regurgitate the study’s press release (which says what the drug company, or the researcher allied with a drug company, wants them to say) instead of spending time on independent analysis and research.
• Reliance on Big Pharma’s advertising dollars. As newspaper and other media lose advertising to the Internet and other places, they depend heavily on drug companies (in 2012, the pharmaceutical industry spent $90 million on print advertising). Publishing articles that protect Big Pharma’s interests may be rewarded with more profits.
• Hidden funders. University-published research is always more reliable, right? Think again: Big Food and Big Ag now fund many public and private universities. And, since the funding may be earmarked for, say, research positions, and not specific studies, rampant conflicts of interest can be easily concealed.

 
Armed with a critical eye, an informed reader like you can spot biases. But then how do you track down the real story?
 

• Find a reliable source, such as the Life Extension Foundation (LEF). If you see a media headline or study about dietary supplements that sounds fishy, check out LEF’s website: their scientists and physicians often publish detailed analysis of the studies behind the headlines. LEF is a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to finding new scientific methods to enhance and expand the healthy human life span. LEF develops research programs aimed at unlocking new anti-aging therapies and combating such age-related killers as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, and also plays a crucial role in funding truly independent medical research. Since 75% of clinical medical research is currently funded by private industry, this is of the utmost importance. To learn more about how LEF and ANH-USA work together to defend and educate the natural health community, please click here. ANH-USA is also working on a database of reliable web sites—places that you can trust for information about natural health—that we plan to add to our website in the near future.
• Go to the source. Read the studies themselves, and review their methods and conclusions. Remember, the data snippet that makes headlines is often just a small part of the story (like the New York Time’s flawed liver damage article). Not a scientist? Don’t worry—even the most technical studies have a short, readable abstract.
• Look at the larger body of evidence. Media outlets aren’t interested in publicizing the obvious, which is why they’ll jump on studies that seem to buck the conventional wisdom. In reality, just one study isn’t usually enough to overthrow scientific consensus. Be sure to look at similar studies and well-structured meta-analyses testing the same hypothesis.
• Ask: “Who paid for this?” When Big Business has a financial stake in the outcome, they work hard to create “a false and parallel science.” Look at the study’s funders to see who’s pulling the researchers’ strings (if funders aren’t listed, then you can guess what they’re trying to hide), and find studies funded by private organizations or the researchers themselves.

 
Over the years, we’ve seen our fair share of junk science. Here are some of our “favorite” (read: most outrageous) headlines, and the flawed studies behind them:
 

• “Red Meat Causes Heart Disease!” A 2013 study claimed that the amino acid L-carnitine, found in red meat, supplements, and sports supplements, increases the risk of heart disease. The twist? The sample size was only six humans (in addition to some rats). Meanwhile, a much larger meta-analysis published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings reached the exact opposite conclusion—that L-carnitine reduces the risk of heart disease! Which one do you think was headlined by the major media?
• “Organic Food Isn’t Healthier Than Conventional!” This meta-analysis had it all: it trumpeted just one conclusion—that organic foods don’t have higher nutritional content, completely ignoring the fact that they have 30% less pesticide residue; omitted vital variables (e.g., that organics don’t contain GMOs, or that the nutritional content of food depends on the soil on which it is grown); and excluded crucial studies that proved organics are more nutritious (which the study authors claimed was “accidental”).
• “Egg Yolk is Nearly As Dangerous as Smoking!” For this recall study, participants were asked how many egg yolks they ate a week, over a number of years (unless you’re vegan, this might be a pretty difficult metric to recall). Furthermore, the study authors had a history of financial support from Big Pharma.
• “Raw Milk Cannot be Considered Safe, Under Any Circumstances!” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is often guilty of scientific bias: in 2012, they claimed the rate of outbreaks from unpasteurized milk and dairy was 150 times greater than those linked to pasteurized milk and dairy. However, this study neglected the source of the milk studied–there’s a world of difference between raw milk from a CAFO and raw milk from a local farm. It also conveniently picked a timeframe that ended one year before a deadly e. coli outbreak caused by pasteurized cheese could skew their results.
• “Fish Oil Causes Cancer, and Does Nothing for Your Heart!” Fish oil supplements are the favored scapegoat of Big Pharma and the mainstream media, perhaps because drug companies have several horses in the race including patented, prescription-only fish oil “drugs.” A 2010 study fed seniors margarine—which is full of heart-damaging trans fats—with a little fish oil added, and concluded that fish oil does nothing for the heart! In 2013, a highly-publicized study claimed fish oil supplements cause cancer, without ascertaining the quality or source of the fish oil supplements used, the study participants’ dietary habits, or showing a casual link between cancer and fish oil supplementation.Legitimate questions have been raised about possible toxicity from rancid fish oil, so do select a high quality product and, as Dr. Jonathan Wright, MD, suggests, it is best to take a mixed tocopherol (complete vitamin E) supplement with the fish oil to protect against any rancidity.
• “Calcium Supplements Cause Heart Attacks!” In 2010, the mainstream media cried wolf on calcium supplementation, citing a study claiming that it raises heart attack risk by about 30%. Study participants were given calcium alone, and not crucial co-factors like magnesium, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, and especially vitamin K2. We have pointed out for years that calcium without its co-factors poses risks to the heart. Meanwhile the World Health Organization recommended adding calcium to world water supplies, a terrible idea.
• “Case Closed—Don’t Waste Your Money on Dietary Supplements!” In December 2013, the AMA-controlled Annals of Internal Medicine published an opinion piece definitively claiming that supplements were, at best, totally useless. The mainstream media—misrepresenting the editorial as fact—gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the three studies that “supported” the opinion piece used absurdly low supplement doses; featured bargain-basement, Big Pharma-produced multivitamins; and failed to address the many factors of supplementation (e.g., how it works in tandem with a healthy lifestyle). One study that got ignored showed people who took multivitamins without statins experienced a 34% reduction of cardiovascular risk!

Thanks to the mainstream media’s and government’s cozy, crony capitalist relationship with Pharma and the lack of integrity in their “reporting,” it’s more crucial than ever that consumers like you conduct your own research, and come to your own conclusions in making the best health decisions for yourself and your family.

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The post War on Integrative Medicine, Part Two: Eliminate Supplements first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The Editorial Was Also Based on Flawed Assumptions

The editorial stated:

Most supplements do not prevent chronic disease or death, their use is not justified, they should be avoided. This message is especially true for the general population with no clear evidence of micronutrient deficiencies, who represent most supplement users in the United States.

This simply isn’t true. Most consumers don’t take vitamins to “prevent chronic disease or death,” as the editorial says. They’re just trying to bolster their overall health in combination with diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices. The integrative community knows there’s no “magic pill” for health, and therefore strives for holistic solutions. In this sense, the Annals editorial perfectly personified the Achilles’ Heel of modern medicine: its hyper-focus on piecemeal, “one-pill-per-symptom” approaches to health.
Implying that the general population has “no micronutrient deficiencies” perpetuates a common anti-supplement myth: that we can get all of the vitamins and minerals we need from the average American diet. Common sense and a growing body of scientific evidence heartily disagree!
Fully twenty percent of Americans eat fast food twice a week; fourteen percent eat fast food three or more times a week. We can’t get all the micronutrients we need from burgers and fries! But even if we were to eschew fast food and crafted healthy meals every day, we’d still be lacking critical micronutrients: according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), up to 93% of Americans don’t get enough micronutrients in their diet due, in part, to soil depletion and our practice of breeding plants based solely on taste and aesthetics: in vegetables, for example, iron content has fallen 27% since 1940. As we have also pointed out, people vary greatly in their ability to digest and assimilate nutrients.

Study One: Multivitamins and Adults

This meta-analysis (which combines the results of selected independent studies, which itself introduces bias) showed “no clear evidence” of a beneficial effect of supplements on cancer prevention. Surprised by these results, ANH-USA’s sister organization, ANH-International, did a thorough analysis of the study’s design and found it to be a “perfect example of a study designed to fail”:

• The supplementation doses were below the Institute of Medicine’s Tolerable Upper Levels (ULs). ULs are intrinsically flawed and result in extremely low doses, as they focus on the single most sensitive adverse effect occurring in the most vulnerable sub-population. It’s likely that these doses were too low to have any real effect.
• The supplements used were synthetic, “bargain basement” multivitamins produced by Big Pharma.
• The study failed to address how supplementation works in tandem with a healthful, active lifestyle.

Additionally, the study claimed to analyze multivitamins—yet out of the twenty-seven studies considered, only three looked at multivitamins.

Study Two: Older Men, Multivitamins, and Cognitive Decline

According to the editorial’s summary, multivitamins do not prevent cognitive decline in men over 65. However, according to the study’s own declaration of limitations, the doses used may have been “too low” and the study participants “too well-nourished” to benefit from a multivitamin.
Participants in this study were considered “adherent” to their multivitamin regimen if they took it a mere two-thirds of the time—as LEF pointed out in its rebuttal, that means you could skip the multivitamin four months out of the year, and still be included in the study results!
There’s also the problem of taking a single multivitamin for something as serious as cognitive decline, when other supplements (such as some B vitamins and foods such as coconut oil) are far more appropriate.
Then there’s the problem of the study’s main sponsors—and the strong possibility of conflicts of interest: Pfizer (which has been trying and failing to market an Alzheimer’s drug) and the chemical company BASF. These companies have a vested interest in the failure of supplements to help cognitive decline.

Study Three: Multivitamins in the Prevention of a Second Heart Attack

The intent of this study was to learn more about chelation therapy, not determine the benefits of dietary supplements. But somehow, the editorial uses this study as hard evidence that multivitamins don’t work.
You wouldn’t be able to tell this from the headlines, but any conclusions that can safely be drawn from the study actually indicate the incredible benefit of dietary supplements: those who took multivitamins without statins experienced a 34% reduction of cardiovascular risk! This is enough to “reach a high level of statistical significance,” (meaning it’s unlikely that the benefit observed was due to chance).
How could the editorial’s authors claim otherwise? In their analysis, they misleadingly lumped patients with vital differences together in one group. For example, some of the study participants were taking statins, while some weren’t. Since past research has shown that dietary supplements for heart health should not be used in tandem with statins (just another reason why statins have more drawbacks than benefits!), the results of the statin and non-statin groups should have been analyzed separately. Instead, the editors assessed them together. This essentially compared “apples to oranges,” and skewed the overall results.
Furthermore, the authors failed to acknowledge that subjects in the group that received multivitamins had a higher rate of diabetes. The problem? Since people with diabetes are twice as likely to suffer heart disease, this may have also tainted the study’s “lump sum” results.
In any case, as both the study itself and the editorial are forced to state, no definitive conclusions can be safely drawn from this study, because it had a participant drop-out and non-adherence rate of 46%!
The Annals served up exactly what mainstream media loves: a reinforcement of the conventional medical narrative, “definitive” hyperbole, and a healthy dose of natural-health-bashing. The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Reuters, the New York Times, Fox News, and a number of local news outlets gobbled up the editorial word-for-word, leading with such headlines as “Study Finds Multivitamins Are a Complete Waste of Money, Why Do We Keep Taking Them?”
In their eagerness to bash supplements, the mainstream media seems to have lost their memory (we’d recommend niacinamide for that): less than two years ago, they touted the Journal of American Medical Association’s study, which found that low-dose multivitamins may help prevent cancer in men, cutting their risk by up to 8%. The difference? That study’s centerpiece was the multivitamin Centrum Silver, made by Big Pharma company and mainstream-media advertising giant Pfizer.
What this demonstrates is how utterly controlling Big Pharma is when it comes to these studies. When the drug companies want to show supplements in a bad light (because they might compete with their high-dollar pharmaceutical, as with statins), the results are negative. But once in a while, when they have their own product to sell (here, their own brand of multivitamin), the results are more positive. Pfizer doesn’t sell expensive pharmaceuticals that “prevent” cancer, so they’re content to make a few bucks off of the mainstream media promoting their junk, low-dose vitamin.

The post War on Integrative Medicine, Part Three: Get the Public to Believe Junk Science first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

No, meat is not unsafe—nor is L-carnitine.

• a diet high in L-carnitine promotes the growth of certain bacteria that metabolize the amino acid;
• during that metabolization, an organic compound called trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO) is produced in the blood; and
• this compound increases risk of heart disease.

The study further states that vegetarians and vegans have different gut bacteria, which do not produce a burst of TMAO after consuming L-carnitine.
There is a lot to find fault with in this study.
First, there’s the question of the study participants. Most of the study was done on mice, though there was a human component—a tiny sample of only six people, five meat-eaters and one vegan. That’s right, their conclusion that vegetarians and vegans have different gut bacteria that don’t produce a burst of TMAO after consuming L-carnitine was based on just one individual.
We also don’t know how healthy the five meat-eaters were in this study. The study found that the red meat eaters did not produce TMAO after a course of antibiotics. This suggests that these subjects’ immune systems were already damaged—not that all meat eaters’ are. At the same time, it is still unclear whether TMAO production is caused by eating red meat at all (this was just an assumption), and whether raised TMAO levels actually cause heart disease.
Second, the idea that L-carnitine causes heart disease conflicts with other, better evidence. A large and recent meta-analysis, published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, suggests that L-carnitine is helpful for heart disease, not a cause. This meta-analysis specifically tested L-carnitine on hard outcomes in humans who had already experienced acute myocardial infarction, and found that L-carnitine was associated with significant reduction in death from all causes and a highly significant reduction in ventricular arrhythmias and anginal attacks following a heart attack, compared with placebo or control. In other words, L-carnitine, far from being harmful to the heart, actually heals it!
None of the media reports we saw bothered to mention any of the positive effects of L-carnitine—even those mentioned in the study itself. Its essential function is to transport fatty acids into our mitochondria, which may be why it is so beneficial to heart patients. It also helps with kidney disease and male infertility, reduces fat mass, increases muscle mass, and reduces fatigue. In elderly patients, it also helps energy metabolism and improves neurotransmitter function in the brain.
And if L-carnitine is actually good for us, what about meat? That’s still controversial. But other studies don’t support the conclusion that it harms us. An extremely large meta-analysis published by Circulation (over 1.2 million participants) found that fresh and unprocessed red meat consumption was not associated with increased heart disease risk, stroke, or diabetes.
In addition, this one, much-hyped study makes no differentiation between different types or sources of meat. As we have discussed frequently in the past, industrialized factory farm meat is very different from organic, local, grass-fed meat in its nutrient composition. Meat from CAFOs—that is, confined animal feeding operations—contains twenty times the amount of omega-6 fatty acids (which are associated with inflammation, arthritis, and cancer) than healthier omega-3 fatty acids, have much more fat marbling, and may be full of antibiotics.
Grass-fed beef has nearly seven times more omega-3s than omega-6s, so eaten in moderation, it offers healthier levels of essential fats. Moreover, grass-fed beef is lower in total fat, and higher in vitamin E complex, beta-carotene, thiamin, riboflavin, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and CLA—and these differences may have a tremendous impact on both the types of bacteria in the gut and the levels of TMAO produced. But of course, we won’t know about that, because this was never even thought about in the study.
What none of these overhyped media reports—not to mention the study itself— take into account is the reality of bioindividuality. No one diet, and no one selection of supplements, should be advocated for everyone. Only a balanced diet tailored to each individual body’s personal needs will ensure one’s health in the long run.

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Big Pharma is drooling over the prospect of getting it all to themselves.

The post New Study Touts Big Health Benefits of Resveratrol first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

For one thing, he isn’t a scientist at all.

• “I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.” Lynas says GMO benefits small farmers, who rely on and want the seeds. Not true. Farmers in India went into debt to buy GE seeds, hoping for increased yield, and when those crops failed due to pest infestation, they were left more impoverished with no prospects for the future. Farmers were not told that the crops would require twice the amount of water, and that the crops do not produce viable seeds—which means the farmers would have to keep purchasing new seeds. In response, many farmers killed themselves. The rate of Indian farmer suicides began increasing after the introduction of Monsanto’s Bt cotton in 2002, and two-thirds of farmer suicides occur in five Indian states, which has come to be known as India’s “Suicide Belt.” Over 17,000 farmers in India committed suicide in 2009 alone because of Monsanto and GE seeds. Many of the farmers made their suicides a symbolic act by drinking Monsanto’s pesticide. Lynas’s primary argument here is that GMOs will feed the world and increase crop yields. Our extensive article shows that this simply isn’t true.
• “I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.” True about insecticides, but wrong about the rest—insecticides are not the only chemical problem. GMOs have dramatically increased the use of herbicides. Roundup Ready crops have grown resistant to herbicides, creating superweeds that require even more dangerous and toxic herbicides.
• Lynas calls the regulatory system in Europe burdensome, unnecessarily increasing the cost of GMOs. Not everywhere! Here in the US there is no regulatory system specific to GMOs, turning consumers into human guinea pigs, and concentrating money and power in the hands of few powerful biotech companies, with the USDA rubberstamping GMO deregulation to the benefit of Big Farma.
• “I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding, using mutagenesis for example.” Safer than mutagenesis, a process that involves exposure to radiation and chemicals? Maybe. Safe? Categorically untrue. For someone who says he has come to love the scientific method, this is a remarkably unscientific conclusion, because there have been no long-term human studies supporting the safety of GMOs. What is most notable about the GMO field is the lack of independent, objective, and long-term studies in humans. There have, however, been plenty of animal studies, and here the science is becoming clearer: GMOs may be causing birth defects, high infant mortality rates, fertility problems, and sterility in hamsters, rats, mice, and livestock fed GMO soy and corn, and some hamster pups even began growing hair inside their mouths. Studies indicate other serious health risks as well: immune system dysregulation, with changes in the number of immune response cells showing up in the gut, spleen, and blood—all of which points to an allergenic and inflammatory response to GMOs; increased aging (especially in the liver); dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation; and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen, and gastrointestinal system.

The real story here is not Lynas’s antics, from pie-throwing to dramatic recantations. It is the media’s coverage of the latest self-promotional stunt. Cover the stunt if you like, but please do not pretend that this has anything remotely to do with science.
Editor’s Note, 1/25/13: In an earlier version of this article, we included an abbreviated quote by Mark Lynas on the safety of GM.

The post Have You Heard about the Famous Anti-GMO Scientist Who Switched Sides and Is Now Pro? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Science for sale! Researchers with ties to industry are paying big money to ensure that scientific independence is a thing of the past.

• Mars Inc. funded the University of California’s research into the benefits of chocolate.
• Monsanto gave $2.5 million to Texas A&M to endow a chair for plant breeding, and another $500,000 to Iowa State University to endow a soybean breeding faculty chair.
• Pioneer Hi-Bred funds five positions at Iowa State, including a chair in maize breeding.
• Kraft Foods gave $1 million for a professor’s position at the University of Illinois’s school of nutrition.
• The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois in Champaign–Urbana recently accepted a $250,000 grant from Monsanto to create an endowed chair for the “Agricultural Communications Program” it runs with the College of Communications.
• Yale School of Medicine teamed up with PepsiCo to create a “research laboratory” in Science Park, which is adjacent to Yale’s campus. This may be an attempt to neutralize the university’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which has advocated less consumption of sugary sodas like those made by PepsiCo.

Washington State University–Pullman offers an MBA degree—but this one is a Masters in Beef Advocacy, an industry-funded program that trains college students to fight back against critics of big agribusiness. The degree is designed to equip beef producers across the country “to tell their story in presentations to schools and church/civic groups, through local media and in the ‘virtual’ world of the Internet.”
Professors who speak out often face a backlash. In 2009 Michael Pollan, noted author and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, was supposed to lecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but Harris Ranch Beef Co. threatened to pull its $150,000 donation from the school if the lecture went forward. Sponsors of Pollan’s lectures have also faced resistance from farm businesses in Washington and Wisconsin.
Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture was the scene of some dramatic pressure tactics: the Center had been a staunch advocate for alternative and sustainable agriculture. Suddenly its director, Fred Kirschenmann, was forced to step down. What happened? We don’t know for sure. But the Leopold Center operates under the authority of Iowa State University’s College of Agriculture, and the USDA, which is largely controlled by GMO interests, gave the university $56.8 million in 2012. On top of that, the state of Iowa gives the university $216.6 million to support its daily operations, so there is undoubted pressure from the state as well—Iowa received $23.6 billion in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2011, and leads all states in hog production, most of them from CAFOs (confined-animal feeding operations).
The dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis, recently estimated that roughly 20 percent of his college’s annual research budget now comes from industry. And his university is not alone. Here are a few others:

Many, many more are listed in the stunning report released by Food & Water Watch that we cited above.
Earlier this month we reported about Stanford’s sloppy research in its meta-analysis of the nutritional value of organic foods. Now take a look at the study authors’ conflicts of interest. Even though they stated there were no primary funding sources, the Cornucopia Institute noted that there are clear financial ties between Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, which supports the report’s researchers financially, and the chemical and agribusiness industry. Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural business enterprise, has donated millions to the Institute. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which strongly promotes GMOs in Third World countries, has also provided support.
It’s not just the agriculture industry that has its hand in muddying the university research waters. Dr. Ingram Olkin, co-author of the Stanford organics study, accepted money from the Council for Tobacco Research, which has been described as using science for “perpetrating fraud on the public.” And many research universities are funded in a big way by pharmaceutical companies. We will return to this issue in a future newsletter article.
Research funding from industry has outpaced government funding for universities, and some university budgets are disproportionately dependent on industry funding. The Food & Water Watch report has some extremely illuminating tables showing university funding from agribusiness, the presence of industry on school boards, and the donation of money for buildings and facilities. For example, we learned from this report that Colorado State University now has a “feed facility for research on the environmental benefits of feedlots.” UC Berkeley received $25 million from Novartis (now owned by GMO giant Syngenta) in exchange for this donation; Novartis was reportedly given two of the five seats on the research committee and the ability to influence research projects and delay research findings. It was also awarded licensing options for 30 percent of university projects. The University of Georgia reportedly offers seats on its board of advisors to industry for $20,000 each.
Does all this funding have a direct influence on researchers? Absolutely. According to the report, more than fifteen percent of university researchers acknowledge having “changed the design, methodology, or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.” If fifteen percent readily acknowledge it, how many more have been influenced but are reluctant to admit it?
We’ll conclude with the troubling story of South Dakota State University. According to the report, David Chicoine, president of SDSU, joined Monsanto’s board of directors in 2009. That year he received $390,000 from Monsanto, more than his academic salary. Just a few weeks before Chicoine joined the Monsanto board, the company sponsored a $1 million plant breeding fellowship program at SDSU.
Immediately SDSU started suing farmers for patent infringement because they were engaging in the time-honored practice of “saving seed” (farmers have historically saved the seed from their strongest crops for the next year in order to share and sell in future harvests, instead of purchasing an entirely new batch of seeds). SDSU joined Monsanto in identifying farmers who saved seed by using private investigators and toll-free anonymous hotlines.
Several farmers settled the lawsuits for $175,000, and consented to allow SDSU inspect their farms, facilities, business records, and telephone records for up to five years. Ironically, some of the SDSU seeds were developed with farmers’ and taxpayer dollars through funds from the South Dakota Wheat Commission.
Texas A&M, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University have similarly started suing farmers. Such universities don’t simply have conflicts of interest. They are in danger of becoming puppets of Big Farma. If this is allowed to go on unabated, how can anyone believe that their research is in any way independent and reliable?

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You’d think Stanford would be above such sloppy research. You’d be wrong.

The post New Junk Science Study Dismisses Nutritional Value of Organic Foods first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.